Multiple open services: a new approach to service provision in open hypermedia systems

Over the past decade, hypermedia systems have become increasingly open, distributed, and modular. As a direct result of this, open hypermedia systems have been increasingly successful in providing middleware services such as linking to a large set of clients. This paper presents a new approach to service provision in open hypermedia systems based on the concept of multiple open services. The overall idea with multiple open services is to rethink the way in which services are provided to clients. The goal is to split up services into components, each of which provides a general, scalable, and functionally independent (orthogonal) service. This results in a highly flexible architectural framework that can serve as a vehicle to further investigate many of the open issues relating to open hypermedia systems. The approach can be viewed as a natural next step in the evolution towards more open, distributed, and modular hypermedia systems. The concept of multiple open services is described in detail, and a proof of concept implementation called Construct is presented.